


Quadra

by The_Exile



Category: Star Ocean: The Second Story | Second Evolution, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
Genre: F/M, divine creative differences of opinion, fallen deities, mild creepy boss/employee obsession, tie-ins between games in same series, tie-ins to other fics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:52:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7772980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>President Luther Lansfeld has a small icon of Tria in the corner of his office. It's a valuable antique, from the days when She was always a beautiful Creator Goddess and never a formless mass of chaos, when She had a God of Order around to keep the balance. Nobody else remembers those days. </p><p>Sometimes he wonders why the new lead programmer looks so much like Her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quadra

President Luther Lansfeld gazed at the icon of Tria in the small shrine in the corner of his office.

They didn't make statuettes of the Goddess like this any more. His clients believed his interest in religious antiques to be a deliberate ostentatious flourish. Others believed that he was attempting to cultivate the impression that he had a pious side to him, a contrast to his notoriety as a ruthless businessman, or maybe an indication that he believed in tradition. For those who recognised the icon as a heresy that had been forbidden for thousands of years, it only reinforced the reputation of his that had gained him the nickname of 'Lucifer'.

The irony of that nickname brought a sad, crooked half-smile to the corners of his lips. 

Even after thousands of years' worth of wear and tear, it was still a good likeness. Her hair had been golden like the sun shining down upon the simple sky-blue robes she always wore, the impression of a summer’s day completed by three sets of avian wings like thin layers of clouds billowing across the sky. Her wings had been that of a XINE, a celestial bird that had been considered sacred before that, too, was erased from all future prophecies and retroactively declared heretical. She was shorter than she was depicted, her eyes more distant, her smile more vacant. She looked a little pale from working too many long hours in the Seraphic Gate. There was nothing of chaos about her back then, only focus on something other than the Universe around her. Certainly nothing like the freeze-frame of a constant maelstrom of shifting forms and minds, vain attempts to capture a moment of pure pandemonium, that he saw in most temples these days. 

It was true that he did not like public places of worship, and he was constantly aware of how uncomfortable others felt as soon as he stepped through the doors, clergy and laypeople alike. He explained it to his clients and colleagues as a desire for privacy. They did not need to know how much his head hurt when he spotted every slight inaccuracy, or how he didn't really want to draw Her attention to him all that much.

Of course, statues of Quadra no longer existed at all. The concept of a counterpart to Tria's chaos, a force for order to maintain balance in the Universe, was glaringly conspicuous in its absence, yet nobody seemed to notice. Another convenience of being able to touch so many minds at once through prophecy. Even the executive of the world's largest corporation had not been able to track down a statue of Quadra, even as a devil, which would probably have hurt less - either she truly hated him so much that she could not bear to have anything in existence that reminded her of him, even if it meant sabotaging the memories of others, an act she would have found as deplorable as murdering him, or her nature had already degraded to the point that she no longer had a concept of morality. Either way, he had to rely on his memory when he imagined how they used to sit side by side at their desk as she excitedly told him about her latest project and he tried to think how to break it to her gently that it was logically impossible unless she wanted the resulting paradox to destroy the entire Universe.

Quadra had always worn a black courtier’s robes with a red sash like a blood moon, complete with a tall hat that he neatly tucked his raven hair under. His wings had been a Shadow XINE's, not a regular XINE's, and yet for some reason he was always the one associated the most with the bird. Maybe he really did have an avian manner about him. Tria used to laugh when she told him that he reminded her of a graceful but deadly bird of prey, watching for sinners with his beady eyes and waiting for the right moment to swoop down on them. 

_Could you try and be friendly for once? You’re supposed to be the one who understands mortals,_ she would say.

_I do, Tria, and that’s why I don’t let them off easy. You haven’t seen how much they take advantage of your gifts before I make them stop._

_Well, I just worry that you’ll get overenthusiastic one day and hurt someone who’s just trying to be creative or fix a problem on their own or something._

_The last system I went to, they were creating an army of zombies out of a planet’s population they’d just wiped out with a single symbol._

_There was no reason to ban that entire planet from using creation energy._

_I didn’t, I just made sure I was their only supplier so I could regulate things a little._

_Quadra, I don’t like it when you talk about divine inspiration as though it’s a business. I don’t like it in general when you talk that much like a mortal._

_You just said you wanted me to be more in touch with them._

_Not to the extent of forgetting you aren’t one. Especially if you can see such evil in them all the time..._

He didn't notice that he had crushed his coffee cup until a sharp pain informed him that his hand was covered in scalding water. The healing symbology was as simple as a wave of his hand. At least she hadn't put him in the body of a human with weak or no symbological potential. Not that he couldn't get artificial symbology programmed for him just as easily these days. Psychiatric symbology still didn't work even once, though, and the memories would never stop hurting. It pained him more to remember that she had once chided him gently than to remember the moment when she banished him into a mortal body forever. He didn't even remember exactly what the last straw had been. It wasn't anything big, as he recalled, just one more of a string of stupid mistakes he had made, times he had pushed it just a little too far. Maybe he had been too harsh with someone trying to misuse Tria's gifts or claim that Her miracles were their own doing. Maybe he had refused to translate a prophecy into an obscure language because it would take him three years and only ten people lived on the planet. 

_If you wish to be a mortal so much, then so be it,_ had been her last words to him before he was bodily dragged out of the Seraphic Gate by Gabrie Celeste and Iselia Queen. He liked to think he had been dignified, but he remembered screaming something about plagiarists and trying to bite Gabrie, even as she screamed back at him and threw random objects at him that she conjured out of raw creation energy with no regard for the laws of conservation of matter.

Around the twentieth time he replayed that scene in his mind, he managed to break out of the harmful cycle. He resolved to go and clear his head by actually walking to the coffee machine rather than ordering a replacement cup delivered to his office. By the time he returned, he had decided on an activity to distract him: he would take his new prototype virtual avatar on a test run. He had done the same thing last week but there had been a lot of progress made on it since then. His lead programmer was skilled. Ms. Vineyard was no eyesore, either. He smiled as he remembered her face, still youthful and exuberant, with a genuine passion for the company and for her work. No, he chastised himself, his smile disappearing, that's not how you genuinely think. You're not a real mortal quite yet, so you certainly don't have those sort of luxuries. You're just obsessed with Welch because she looks so much like Her. 

The Goddess probably did that on purpose, he thought. Either that, or Welch was spying on you, on the company, maybe even associated with an attack on Tria Herself. Maybe she was even making herself so appealing to him on purpose so that she could lure him into making a move, then expose him to the press as the wicked, lecherous boss who used his power to seduce younger women. There were so many spies all around him, so many thieves and saboteurs. He stopped himself before he could crush the replacement coffee cup. Cooling it down with another simple gesture, he drained the coffee, then incinerated the cup with a third symbol. Now, that was true satisfaction. He grinned, then leaned back in his seat, awaiting the transition into the virtual environment of the Eternal Sphere and his new body.

He had to admit that Lucifer - or Cyril Lucifer, since Eternal Sphere characters were supposed to have forenames and surnames and his sister had a pet Bunny called Cyril - was heavily based on Quadra's appearance. Not only was he lacking in imagination when it came to original designs - something Tria had always teased him about - he liked there to be at least one effigy of Quadra out there, even if it was digital and nobody recognised it for what it was. He could probably never revive the memory of Quadra - he shuddered to think what Tria might do to him in retribution if her mind really had deteriorated as much as he feared - but maybe this was close enough. A virtual world as advanced as the Eternal Sphere was practically real, the President of an enterprise as large as the Sphere Corporation was practically deified. Here, in the realm that he owned, without Tria's constant insistence that he was only a servant of the people, a vessel for the raw force of creation, was the one place where he was still a God.

Or at least a devil, which was the next best thing.


End file.
